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Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe sews seeds of hope

This season of speakers for the Unique Lives & Experiences lecture series begins with Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe. She created a school to rehabilitate girls and young women who escaped the rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, a Ugandan nun who works with young women formerly captive by rebel forces, is the first speaker for 2015's Unique Lives & Experiences series. (Derek Watson)

Not so long ago Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe would never have imagined travelling the globe, addressing large audiences and being lauded by the likes of Time magazine.

But all that’s happening to the Ugandan nun, who has restored hope and dignity to thousands of girls and young women ravaged by the horrors of her country’s civil war.

“I’ve always done things in a quiet manner, in a hiding way,” she says, on the phone from Italy, where she’s landed after speaking at a Women of Impact dinner in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum.

“I never knew anyone would come to know about me,” she says.

Plenty of people do. Nyirumbe, 59, was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people last year. In 2007 she was a CNN Hero of the Year.

Her life began simply enough. One of eight children, Nyirumbe’s uneducated mother was a housewife, her father a carpenter. Her father believed education was for boys and that girls should be prepared for marriage.

“But my mother stood very firm and said she was going to make sure all her children go to school,” Nyirumbe says.

At 14, Nyirumbe decided she wanted to become a nun and a year later began preparing to enter the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. With lots of practice caring for nieces and nephews, Nyirumbe was assigned to maintain an orphanage, then trained in midwifery in northern Uganda.

One surgeon saw potential and taught her other skills, like stitching. “It turned out to be very useful for me in the situation of war,” she says. “I was the only one in that area operating a hospital and orphanage.”

Even before the terrorist group Lord’s Resistance Army took over power there were signs of trouble, she says. Nyirumbe had returned to Gulu, a city in northern Uganda about 320 kilometres from the country’s capital Kampala, for additional medical training, but that was cancelled in 1986 when the LRA began their reign of terror.

Nyirumbe was sent back to manage the orphanage and medical clinic, where children started seeking shelter, fleeing the rebels’ methods of kidnapping boys and girls, turning boys into soldiers and girls into sex slaves.

Nyirumbe says so many girls and young women came for protection she sewed habits to disguise some as nuns. Others were hidden in empty food barrels.

At one point one girl stood out from the others — most notably because she couldn’t look anyone in the eye. Nyirumbe discovered she’d been a rebel, forced to commit unspeakable acts.

“She was scared even of her own friends,” Nyirumbe says. She began spreading the word that anyone escaped and returning from the rebels were welcome. Many had children conceived in rape and were shunned by their home villages.

The result is Sewing Hope, a school in Gulu that teaches girls to sew and reintegrate into their communities. Nyirumbe sees the sewing machine as a weapon that brings love and self-sufficiency back to their lives.

“I wanted to rid the cycle of wars using my hands, using my arms, so we can fight back by restoring the dignity of these girls,” she says.

She taught them skills to enable them to seek employment in either tailoring, hairstyling or as restaurant staff. “They will still use their hands, they will still use their brain,” she says.

They use pop can tabs and make purses, which are sold online — mostly to U.S. customers, although they’d like to see sales increase around the world.

With Sewing Hope well-established, Nyirumbe can travel and spread the word, hoping for more funding. “We really need money and support to continue this job and for us to continue bringing even more women to be economically empowered by using these skills,” she says.

The girls no longer need her constant presence. “I find I don’t teach them anymore, they teach themselves,” she says.

Nyirumbe speaks at 7:30 p.m., Feb 9. Tickets are available from $59 by calling the Roy Thomson Hall box office at 416 897-4255 or at www.uniquelives.com .

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